Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly.
Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly – as some struggle to access food, gas and medical care.
More than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the region are still without power after Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday, leaving at least 11 people dead across Texas and Louisiana.
Many residents are sheltering with friends or family who still have power, but many can’t afford to leave their homes, Houston City Councilman Julian Ramirez told CNN. And while countless families have lost food in their warming fridges, many stores are still closed, leaving government offices, food banks, and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas, he said.
It's a bigger economic problem than people are talking about. I have a manager who works from Houston. He can't work right now. Several other coworkers as well.
At some point, employers will have to consider the liability of employing someone in Texas, simply because a power outage could seriously impact them.
It sure would be stupid if Texas wasn't connected to the national grid because that would make solving this problem a lot slower and a lot more expensive.
I see a lot of people here blaming the TX grid but not all of Texas is under ERCOT.
SE of Houston, power is supplied by Entergy Texas which also supplies power along most of the gulf coast.
Here is a statement from them, "As of 6:30 p.m. Friday, Entergy Texas crews have safely restored electrical power to approximately 199,100 of the 252,460 customers impacted by Hurricane Beryl. We expect all customers who can safely take power to be restored no later than Monday, July 15."
These are not TX policy decisions causing these outages. It is simply economical decisions that are made throughout the national grid system to make it affordable to deliver the vast quantities of power that people need at a price they can afford. It's simply a fact of life that when you have such a powerful storm passing through, any human built system is going to fall to the power of mother nature.
I was a electrical engineer back in college, so if anyone has any specific things they want to ask, I'll try to respond.
I'm not an economist though so I can't tell you why it's more important for peoples heating and cooling bills to be closer to $100 a month instead of $300 and why the policy decisions are made to support that. And this is with modest electrical usage setting my AC to cool down to a conservative 78-80 degrees since I'm cheap and want to conserve energy.
A lot of sarcasm here, but I fail to see how deregulation or Texas's separate grid contributed to this problem. I see two main contributing factors:
The storm wasn't projected to hit Houston this hard. The projected track had it making landfall way down the coast in Corpus Christi just 48 hours before, and the day before that it was projected to hit Brownsville, a solid 350 miles away. Houston was not projected to be the target until the last minute, so many people were caught unprepared, including Centerpoint Energy.
Houston's tree canopy is massive. Sure, Houston has a ton of concrete and deforestation, but it remains on the edge of the Piney Woods, and especially in north and east Houston many areas are completely blanketed in hundred foot tall loblolly pines and sweetgums that are prone to breakage in hurricane force winds. Power lines were shredded, and many homes were damaged by falling trees